Today, we are excited to announce the release of drasyl 0.2.0 with plugin support, message marshaling, port forwarding, a filesystem-based peer discovery, and an ominous wormhole 🕳️.

Changelog

Added

• Plugins can now be defined in the configuration drasyl.plugins. Plugins can be used to change the behavior of the node when interacting with the network.
• DrasylNode.send() can now send arbitrary objects (make sure that a suitable serialization codec is defined in the configuration drasyl.marshalling).
• DrasylNode.identity() returns own identity.
• Node will now try to expose itself via UPnP-IGD/NAT-PMP/PCP (can be disabled in the configuration via drasyl.expose.enabled = false).
• Local Host Discovery: Node can use the file system to discover other drasyl nodes running on the local computer (drasyl.local-host-discovery).
• CLI: wormhole sub-command added.

Changed

• wss://production.env.drasyl.org#025fff6f625f5dee816d9f8fe43895479aecfda187cb6a3330894a07e698bc5bd8 is now the default super peer (drasyl.super-peer.endpoints).
• Configuration drasyl.super-peer.public-key removed (public key can now be specified in configuration drasyl.super-peer.endpoints).
• DrasylNode.send() now returns a future, which complements when the message has been processed.
• DrasylNode.send() no longer throws exceptions, but writes them to the future.
• DrasylNode.send() is no longer synchronized.
• The own identity is now created in the DrasylNode constructor and not at node start.
• The DrasylNode constructor now throws an error if the own identity is invalid.
• Number of threads required by drasyl reduced by internal switch to DrasylScheduler.
• Chat example and CLI now stops the JVM after shutting down the node.
• Javadoc improved.
• Changed to a non-blocking logger.
• Chunking is now disabled by default in the configuration, because it is not fully implemented yet (drasyl.message.max-content-length).
• The drasyl thread pools are now lazily created when the first node is started.
• MessageEvent.getMessage() replaced by MessageEvent.getSender() and MessageEvent.getPayload().
• Messages and Events objects are now immutable.
• Non-started node now throws a NoPathToPublicKeyException for all outgoing messages.
• Removed PeerUnreachableEvent and NodeIdentityCollisionEvent.

Fixed

• Fixed concurrent modification error in PeersManager.
• Fixed concurrent modification error in DirectConnectionsManager.
• Fixed a bug that causes endless loops when a wanted handler was not the next handler in the pipeline.
• Fixed a bug that causes a NullPointerException when the node is started and stopped too quickly.
• Fixed a bug that results in a partially started node if it was started and stopped too quickly.
• Make sure that monitoring is also shut down in case of an error.
• Reduce time till sending ping messages to prevent problems with too aggressive reverse proxies (I mean you, nginx).

Wormhole!?

Starting with version 0.1.0, we also provided a Command Line Interface with useful tools around drasyl (e.g., start a super-peer). This CLI has now been extended by the tool wormhole.

Here, we were inspired by Brian Warner and his software Magic Wormhole. Magic Wormhole can transfer messages, files, or whole directories from one computer to another. For this, none of the computers must be reachable from the Internet. You can read more about how this works in Brian’s Talk from PyCon 2016.

So and what is the use of the wormhole in drasyl? drasyl has the same goal as our inspiration source: Transferring data – regardless of the location – between any two computers worldwide. In contrast to Magic Wormhole, drasyl can also establish direct connections, thus avoiding the detour via a central relay. With the planned additional locality-aware discovery and routing methods we wanted to add to drasyl in the future, our wormhole can select more and better routes. At the moment, we support only transferring single text messages, but in the future, we want to be able to transfer files as well.

Photo by Alexander Antropov on Pixabay